XFS vs Ext4 performance

I wanted to test XFS vs Ext4 performance, so I created two partitions /dev/mapper/vg_hv1-lv_vm1 which is xfs based and /dev/mapper/vg_hv1-lv_vm2 which is ext4 based. Both partitions are on a single RAID-1 disk.

I would expect the timing cached reads results to be very similar, since timining cached reads is a measure of processor, cache and memory. Timing cached reads basically reads from the Linux buffer cache without disk access.

The timing buffered disk read on the other hand flushes the Linux buffer caches and reads through it directly from the disk. These numbers were also very similar.

I myself have also benchmarked various linux filesystems. I might have seen a 10% difference in one fs over another under certainly identical test/hardware conditions, but after certain (unnamed) filesystems established track records of partial or even total data loss, I now rate a file system for what it is meant to do – collect/recall metadata for storage with 100% fidelity. This is a pass/fail metric.

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I am a Linux Site Reliability Engineering leader (SRE), with a focus on cloud platforms, virtualization, automation, and a wide range of other Unix infrastructure tools. You can reach me at alicsyed@gmail.com.